Alpha Announcement

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 03:46:25PM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul W. Frields" 
> <stickster at gmail.com>
> To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 2:49 PM
> Subject: Re: Alpha Announcement
>
>
>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 01:12:35PM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul W. Frields"
>>> <stickster at gmail.com>
>>> To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
>>> Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2009 9:39 AM
>>> Subject: Re: Alpha Announcement
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 08:58:08AM -0400, Eric Christensen wrote:
>>>>> I've taken the Alpha announcement from F10 and morphed it[1] for F12.
>>>>> Please take a look at it and see what you can update.  This should be
>>>>> completed by COB tomorrow (Friday).
>>>>>
>>>>> [1]
>>>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Announcement_for_F12_Alpha_Release
>>>>
>>>> Keeping in mind that our previous Alpha releases ("Can we successfully
>>>> compose it?") were somewhat different than the current Alpha ("Should
>>>> be generally testable"), the content of this announcement may need to
>>>> change somewhat.  Here's the F11 Beta announcement for comparison:
>>>>
>>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F11_Beta_Announcement
>>>>
>>>> Note the new Alpha is something more like previous Beta, and the new
>>>> Beta coming next month is more like previous Preview Release.
>>>
>>> I was thinking the same thing.  (Just getting caught up after broken
>>> email). It is probably worth mentioning something like we have always
>>> said rawhide is known to eat babies, with this new strategy we probably
>>> don't know whether alpha will be more or less voracious.
>>
>> The idea should be "less voracious than pre-Alpha Rawhide, or the
>> level of voracity in F11 Alpha."  Alpha in Fedora now means
>> essentially the same as industry-wide, in our case "feature-complete
>> and testable."  That means that Alpha is publicly testable, not by
>> just an anointed few.  Beta should now mean "code-complete and
>> (hopefully) as bug-free as possible."  We all know that bugs happen,
>> but Beta should be as close to a final release as humanly possible.
>>
>
> Yes, my first thought is that this should be a lot better than previous  
> alphas.
>
> But then I thought .... hmmmm, we've never actually done this before, so  
> from that perspective, it's even riskier than before ;-)

It's that, too!  Excellent insight, John. :-)

> But I think we probably should speak to this whole idea of trying to make 
> our alpha and beta a little more like the rest of the world.  Most people 
> would probably expect this alpha to be like the previous ones, and it 
> really isn't.  Whether that would make it more attractive or not, well, 
> it would make it more attractive to ME, but sometimes I'm surprised at 
> how people view some things.

James Laska (jlaska) and Jesse Keating (Oxf13) can probably speak to
this more eloquently than I.  But I think you're right that we should
have a short explanation about this in the announcement.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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